The last ten years have witnessed the widespread use of IC cards in everyday life in a short span of time. The smart cards are widely used in numerous products, such as mobile phones, credit cards, debit cards, prepaid and postpaid calling cards, ID cards, as well as several industries including communications, tradeoff, and authentication. In fact, the smart card is a microcomputer with CPU (central processing unit) and storage. The difference between smart cards and other cards, such as magnetic stripe cards, mainly lies in security, data storage capacity and verification process. Each smart card has its own ID (identification) and secret key. The ID and secret key are used to identify the card owner, and then for verification, payment, supply, customer transfer, and other services. Because the data is closely guarded by the smart card, the data cannot be duplicated or altered. Some data is exclusively reserved to the card issuer or certain authorized agents with the purpose of setting up the account. Other data, such as the secret key, is not available to anyone, even the card issuer. While this unique feature ensures the security, it is a disadvantage when the card issuer wants to provide new services for the current customers.
In addition, the card issuer wants to replace the old cards held by customers with new ones offering greater calculating power and more storage. This replacement is necessary, firstly because the application and service of smart cards has been gradually improved through technical progress; secondly, the software and hardware of smart cards must be updated to prevent new attack and fraud.
In the field of mobile communication, smart cards must be replaced when operators try to provide more value-added service. But compared with the banking system, no suitable method for replacing smart cards has been available until now, which is inconvenient for people. To avoid the holders of smart cards having to provide information such as subscriber name and address, many countries rule that the holders of the smart cards for mobile phones may remain anonymous. In the current practical application, the subscribers must go to the offices of the mobile operators or their agents when they want to replace the SIM (Subscriber Identification Module) cards they hold and complete various forms, before the cards are replaced manually. A bottleneck is created due to the large number of subscribers and the limited number of agents, resulting in inconvenience for the subscribers and reduced efficiency for the operators.